KDE 3.5.10 - How to Stop Kwallet Annoyance

On my home desktop I had been using Pidgin (formerly Gaim) and Thunderbird without any password phishing agents like Gnome-Keyring (and Kwallet which never showed up). There is no use of a password phishing agent on a home desktop where you are the only user. But the problem surfaced in PCLinuxOS 2009.2 on which I started using Kmail and Kopete. Overall I was happy at the growth of both these KDE apps, except that kwallet phisher.

I remember right after the fresh installation of pclos 2009.2 I had removed kwallet, but when I fired up kopete and kmail, the kwallet started buzzing me to give a password. And there was no escape, I removed all that hidden kwallet craps and config files from my /home as well as /root directory. Again gave kopete a try, but kwallet came up adamantly and asked for password. Perhaps some kwallet daemon is running all the time.

Thank God! I finally found a fix to disable kwallet at OpenSuse forum.

If you want to disable the use of kwallet, edit ~/.kde/share/config/kwalletrc (if there is no file as kwalletrc create one). Delete all the text from that file and paste:

[Wallet]
Enabled=false

Save the file and reboot your system. Henceforth, kwallet phishing agent won't show up.

Why Some People in India Try Linux and Then Go Back to Windows

From the days of Red Hat 7 till now I have seen many people (windows users) try Linux. But most of them go back to Windows after time of playing around. Why?

Hang on. Before digging why people go back to windows, let's see why anybody looks for an alternative operating system such as Linux or BSD. Is it for the reason that windows is not free? Is it for the reason that Windows is closed-source? Or is it for the reason that Windows is prone to viruses and malware?

Here in India, maximum people are not worried about the price-tag attached with Windows. Because in many cases the PC comes preinstalled, and if not, installing a pirated copy of XP is not that difficult. You would be surprised that most people give a damn to software-piracy. Even many people think that cost of Windows XP is just Rs. 50 (that around 1$ - the approx. price of Windows XP in most parts of India). For them Windows XP costs the same amount as a PCLinuxOS or Mepis disk. Now on to the nature of operating system - they don't care whether it's open-source or closed source as long as it works.

Next is the issue of viruses, spyware and malware. According to me it's the only reason that attracts many people to linux, in India. They hear people talk - linux is very secure.

Then why do they quit? The reason is they expect exact counterparts of Windows application software in Linux. For example, a lay-user after switching to linux seeks for a MS Office alternative in Linux and hits at OpenOffice. Unfortunately he/she doesn't get the same productivity from it. OpenOffice is not that polished, fast or user-friendly as MS Office. OpenOffice is growing feature-wise, but every release leaves makes some edges rough. I have never seen a decent grammar checker in it. Of course, OpenOffice is free, but then, most users also don't pay for MS Office. Its pirated copy comes for around Rs. 50. There are many programs such as photoshop, corel, 3D designing and animation software, audio/video editing software, etc. that run on windows, and they are not ported to linux. Given the present condition of fragmented linux community, they probably will never be ported.

For many users viruses and malware are less annoying than substandard application software that's why windows is leading on the desktop.

We all know linux kernel is more advanced and way better than windows. Linux Gui (KDE and GNOME) has also come a long way to be as good as or better than explorer (in windows) and aqua (in mac). Driver support has also improved a lot. But everything is lost due to lack of proper application software.

PS: This post is about why linux is unable to make a mark on desktop. I know, Linux is the king on servers.

Google's Take on Consumer Desktop - Google Chrome OS

Chrome Browser was the first followed by Android, and Google Chrome OS is the latest buzz in Google camp. It's going to fill the void created sometime back by Red Hat's dropping its Global Desktop (RHGD)

As the Google personnel say, "it's a natural extension of Google Chrome - the Google Chrome
Operating System. It's our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be."

The above proclamation says it all! It'll be nimble, fast and secure - meeting perfectly to average users' demand from a home desktop connected to the Web. Based on certain version of Linux Kernel it will ready in the second half of 2010. Google plans to bring it in a grand way, that means it will come preinstalled in many netbooks, notebooks and desktops.

Needless to say, it will have everything from Google bandwagon, plus moderate bundles of office productivity and multimedia applications.

Read Google Blog for more.

RIPLinuX and TestDisk Made My Day - Recovery was Possible

The day before yesterday something fateful happened. I laid my hands on my brother's refurbished notebook (an old Thinkpad R, the labels are worn away) to install PCLinuxOS 2009.2 MiniMe, and by mistake deleted all the partitions. It had Windows XP installed on its C: drive and all the data (including some serious financial notes, online banking passwords, etc.) were stored on D: and E: drive. I could have undone the "delete partition" thing, but to my bad luck, the laptop just died there due to power failure.

Then I began the disk recover hunt frantically and came across RIPLinuX and some of the recover tools it has, most importantly TeskDisk and Photorec (Later I came to know that PCLinuxOS repository also has both these tools. Had I known it earlier, it could have saved my time downloading around 100 MB). I just popped up the RIPLinuX 9.3 and within 1 minute got my old FAT32 partitions restored. Here is what I did.

RIPLinuX is very nimble when it comes to booting - quite fast and without much verbosity. I logged into RIP with Administrator privileges (root user) and issued "testdisk". It led me to an ncursed based interface.

The first step asked me to whether I would like to create a log file. I chose "CREATE".



The second step listed all the disk drives and prompted me to choose one.

The third step was about choosing the type of partition table. I chose the default (TeskDisk often highlights the right type for you).

The fourth step was the actual recovery procedure where I chose "ANALYSE" option followed by "QUICK SEARCH", and TestDisk displayed all the deleted partitions.



Finally, I had to "WRITE" the changes to the disk.

That's it!

Notes about RIPLinuX:

Recovery Is Possible (RIPLinuX) is a Slackware-based Mini distribution using which you can create a bootable CD or USB drive. It can recover partitions and files of a lot of filesystems including Reiserfs, Reiser4, ext2/3/4, XFS, JFS, UFS, HPFS, HFS, MINIX, MS DOS, NTFS, FAT32 and More).

A Non-fatal Boot Error in Mandriva 2009.1 and its Fix

Mandriva 2009.1 seems me the best release so far. I have not faced a single problem from the day I installed on my work PC. Wireless, bluetooth and almost any device work flawlessly. But I used to see this error message during boot and shutdown.

Configuring wireless regulatory domain nl80211 not found. [FAILED]

All you Mandriva 2009.1 users, here is the fix to stop the above error message.

Comment out CRDA_DOMAIN=US in /etc/sysconfig/network and you won't see that error message on during booting or shutdown.

Here is what I did:

[root@localhost manmath]# nano /etc/sysconfig/network

NETWORKING=yes
#CRDA_DOMAIN=US

Caution: The error message may come live again if you update some packages (related to networking). But then nothing to worry, you can again put a # before CRDA_DOMAIN in /etc/sysconfig/network file.

PCLinuxOS Bandwagon Updated!

Good News! All you PCLinuxOS users. The community has released new quarterly updates of PCLinuxOS Main KDE (2009.2), Gnome Remaster (PCLinuxOS 2009.2 Gnome), two beautiful Mini Versions - PCLinuxOS 2009.1 MiniME and PCLinuxOS 2009.1 Zen Mini.

All these releases come with updated packages. Main KDE version sticks to 3.5.10 version, this time more baked and beautified.

This release also makes an announcement that KDE 4 will be added to the repo soon. And it will find a place in Next Quarterly Update.

Thanks Tex and PCLOS Team!

Looking for a 64-Bit Desktop Linux?

It's been quite long since the 64-Bit processors came to limelight. However, they have been just marketing gimmick of hardware vendors for many reasons. Though most of the modern hardware are capable of supporting 64-Bit computing, the software is really not ready.

64-Bit-readyness is abject in Windows. You can install 64-Bit version of Vista, XP or Windows 7, but you can hardly get 64-bit application software from biggies like Adobe.

Good heavens! The move to 64-Bit computing is relatively faster in OpenSource and Linux. You can get 64-Bit distros from Mandriva, Fedora, Mepis, Debian, and now, Slackware. PCLinux has not taken the leap. I tried them all and got the pains ranging from instability to lack of proper codecs across all except one – Mepis 8.

Mepis 8 64-Bit is perhaps the best 64-Bit distribution if you are happy with KDE 3.5.10. For me it seemed the best tested and optimized distribution, so good that it runs on my entry level 64-Bit box with Intel 965 board and Celeron M 530 1.73 GHz processor.

I would highly recommend Mepis 8 64-Bit to all those ready to plunge into 64-Bit computing.

How to find out in Linux if yours is a 64-bit Processor?

For sometime now I've been working on a low-cost Celeron M 530 1.73 GHz notebook by Compaq. I faintly remember the manual I got with this notebook mentioned somewhere that it's though economic, it's 64 bit processor.

Last night I wanted to try a Mepis 8 64-bit. But before that I started doubting if Intel just made a false proclaimation of this CPU cos it's just a Celeron chip.

In my search across several linux forums to find out if Celeron M 530 is a 64-bit chip I met with 4 commands that tell about the PC's architecture out of which 3 just talked about the architecture type of the installed OS, and only one told about the processor type.

First, I issued command arch

$ arch
i686

No clue about the CPU type, it returned architecture of the installed kernel.

Second, I tried uname

$ uname -a
Linux localhost 2.6.26.8-tex3 #1 SMP Mon Apr 20 17:37:07 EDT 2009 i686 Intel(R) Celeron(R) M CPU 530 @ 1.73GHz GNU/Linux

Again, it told about the installed kernel type, not the CPU.

Third, somebody told me to tray getconf

$ getconf WORD_BIT
32

This command also mentioned about the kernel type - 32 bit.

Finally, I came to know that /proc/cpuinfo only reflects about the Processor type. However, sometime the information is not explicit.

Here is the contents of my /proc/cpuinfo

$ cat /proc/cpuinfo

processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 15
model name : Intel(R) Celeron(R) M CPU 530 @ 1.73GHz
stepping : 10
cpu MHz : 649.998
cache size : 1024 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 10
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss tm pbe nx lm constant_tsc up arch_perfmon pebs bts pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm lahf_lm
bogomips : 3458.39
clflush size : 64

From the above type it's not crearly understood by the "model" or "model name" if the processor is 64-bit capable. However, the "flags" section of cpuinfo reveals it. Presence of the "lm" is only indicator of your CPU being 64-bit capable.

Thank God, I never knew this low-cost celeron m chip supports 64-bit computing. I am going to install Mepis 8 64-bit.

3 Desktop Tweaks on PCLinuxOS 2009.1 Gnome Remaster

1. Give your desktop an XP Look-n-Feel

Blame Redmond how much you can, but you can't deny the fact that XP has been the longest ruling (rules still, may be windows 7 will change the scenario) beast on desktops. That means the default XP theme is the most familiar interface to all. You can also change your Gnome Desktop to look like XP Luna. Download this package, extract it and run the shell script.



2. Lock the Gnome Desktop Panel

If you like simple computing and clean desktop, this tweak will help you. Open gconf-editor and check the box in /apps/panel/global/locked_down as mentioned in the screenshot. Now, your panel and panel icons are locked!



3. Keep the Application Title to the Left

By default application titles in Linux is aligned to middle of titlebar, but you can keep it to extreme left after removing the menu. Open gconf-editor and change the values of /apps/metacity/general/button_layout to ":minimize,maximize,close" (without quotes) as mentioned in the screenshot. Now your application windows have just two items - application title on extreme left and "minimize, maximize, close" buttons on the extreme right!

How Can I Change Gnome Panel Handle?

Some say gnome is not easily configurable. Some say many of the gnome elements are hard-coded. I never bought this until lately when I could not change the gnome panel handle.

Knowledgeable gnome gurus please guide me how to change gnome panel handle or tell me where that panel handle icon is located. I just could not hit where that panel handle png or svg file resides. If I get it I will replace it with a transparent image cos I don't like panel handles.

-------------------------

Good heavens! At last I found a fix to change the default gnome panel handle. It's like this:

create a text file ".gtkrc-2.0" (without quotes) in your /home/user (in my case it is /home/manmath) directory, and place the following text in it.

style "handle"
{
engine "pixmap"
{
image
{
function = HANDLE
file = ".pixel.png"
border = { 0, 0, 0, 0 }
stretch = TRUE
orientation = VERTICAL
}
image
{
function = HANDLE
file = ".pixel.png"
border = { 0, 0, 0, 0 }
stretch = TRUE
orientation = HORIZONTAL
}
}
}
class "PanelAppletFrame" style "handle"

The above configuration text replaces your panel handle with .pixel.png file. You can change the file name as you like. Here I have created a transparent hidden image file .pixel.png (to get rid of that ugly handle) in my /home/user directory.

Now I am happy with transparent gnome panel handle.